I'd been warned. A friend cautioned me that if we went ahead and posted our MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins, I'd get inundated with hate-mail from religious fundamentalists who believe our universe to be less than 10,000 years old. We posted it anyway, and the vitriolic responses poured in as predicted.

But to my amazement, most of them didn't come from religious people, but from angry atheists! I found this particularly remarkable since I'm not religiousmyself.

I have three criticisms of these angry atheists:

1) They help religious fundamentalists:
A key point I wanted to make with our survey is that there are two interesting science-religion controversies: a) Between religion & atheism b) Between religious groups
who do & don't attack science.

2) They could use more modesty:
If I've learned anything as a physicist, it's how little we know with certainty. In terms of the ultimate nature of reality, we scientists are ontologically ignorant.
For example, many respected physicists believe in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which a fundamentally
random process called "wavefunction collapse" occurs whenever you observe something. This interpretation has been criticized both for being
anthropocentric (quantum godfather Niels Bohr famously argued that there's no reality without observation) and for being vague (there's no equation
specifying when the purported collapse is supposed to happen, and there's arguably no experimental evidence for it).

3) They should practice what they preach:
Most atheists advocate for replacing fundamentalism, superstition and intolerance by careful and thoughtful scientific discourse. Yet after we posted our
survey report, ad hominem attacks abounded, and most of the caustic comments I got (including one from a fellow physics professor) revealed that their
authors hadn't even bothered reading the report they were criticizing.

(19-02-2013 02:38 PM)KVron Wrote: I've just this article which I found interesting:

Quote:Religion, Science and the Attack of the Angry Atheists

I'd been warned. A friend cautioned me that if we went ahead and posted our MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins, I'd get inundated with hate-mail from religious fundamentalists who believe our universe to be less than 10,000 years old. We posted it anyway, and the vitriolic responses poured in as predicted.

But to my amazement, most of them didn't come from religious people, but from angry atheists! I found this particularly remarkable since I'm not religiousmyself.

I have three criticisms of these angry atheists:

1) They help religious fundamentalists:
A key point I wanted to make with our survey is that there are two interesting science-religion controversies: a) Between religion & atheism b) Between religious groups
who do & don't attack science.

2) They could use more modesty:
If I've learned anything as a physicist, it's how little we know with certainty. In terms of the ultimate nature of reality, we scientists are ontologically ignorant.
For example, many respected physicists believe in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which a fundamentally
random process called "wavefunction collapse" occurs whenever you observe something. This interpretation has been criticized both for being
anthropocentric (quantum godfather Niels Bohr famously argued that there's no reality without observation) and for being vague (there's no equation
specifying when the purported collapse is supposed to happen, and there's arguably no experimental evidence for it).

3) They should practice what they preach:
Most atheists advocate for replacing fundamentalism, superstition and intolerance by careful and thoughtful scientific discourse. Yet after we posted our
survey report, ad hominem attacks abounded, and most of the caustic comments I got (including one from a fellow physics professor) revealed that their
authors hadn't even bothered reading the report they were criticizing.

Worthless study. It goes based on the "official" stances of organized religious groups. Problem is that the organizations don't speak for the members. People believe what they want to believe; I know many Catholics who are creationists, despite the Catholic church's own public acceptance of evolution. They simply don't know, and their priests don't care enough (or still oppose evolution privately), so they don't get told. This study also takes a lack of mention of evolution or the origins of life, as support for evolution. I'm sorry, it doesn't work like that. Most of the churches that don't "officially" mention evolution, oppose it.

Surveys of Americans regularly show 45 - 55% of Americans do not believe in evolution, and that all of these people are religious. Regardless of what their churches "officially" say, the majority of the Christian populace opposes evolution and science.